Wooden Shjips – “Flight (live in San Francisco)”

While the Shjips are crushers in the studio, its always been true that they conjure a very specific spell live in the room. Its a heady, sweaty, thick as potato soup frozen in amber type of feeling that comes at you in waves. Up until now the true solution to landing in this particular haze has been to seek out the asylum of a Shjips show as release schedules dictate and get lost in the fuzz-drenched deluge of sound. However, this month Silver Current and the band have paired to bring the first official live LP to the band’s catalog. Shjips in the Night: Live in San Francisco: June 8, 2018 captures the band in their element – divining the cosmic thrum and channeling it through the speakers in cascading waves of pure aural bliss.

The set is, as the label states, “the capture of a single live performance, multi-tracked at Slim’s in San Francisco by Eric Bauer and Damien Rasmussen and in a unique creative twist, was mixed by the band’s friends and colleagues in underground psych rock; Heron Oblivion, who hand out the Nitrous balloons and bring their own subtle (and not so subtle) enhancement of the show’s dark but kaleidoscopic color palette to the Shjips’ universe through performance mixing and post-production effects worm-holes, all the while keeping the Shjips’ long time band chemistry and natural sonic power at the forefront of the listener’s experience.”

The set’s available in limited press blue and purple and standard black and will be available in a special RSD version on red and yellow (ltd to 650) as well as cassettes. If you were super early there was a handmade edition as well, but those are long gone. Check out first listen to a live version of West’s “Flight” below, expanding on the track’s natural reverberation and setting the venue on fire with some firelight guitar work. The LP is out on April 12th.